Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Yummy no bake chocolate cakes

Yummy no bake chocolate cakes.




Ingredients :
Foam beads
Acrylic paints in chocolate colors
Miniature gravel
Tacky glue

Also needed :
Piece of glass and a straight blade.

Optional decorations :
Nail art orange slices
Micro beads




The main ingredients for these cakes are foam beads and acrylic paints.  For those who are not familiar with foam beads : they are biggish beads made out of foam  for kids to play with. I buy mine at the dollar store. If you cannot find the beads try pieces of dowel or corks instead.




When you buy the beads it is a good idea to check for different sizes and shapes. The holes will be covered with the decorations .


For the chocolate I used acrylic paints. A dark brown will be fine. For white chocolate you can use a cream color and if you want milk chocolate you can use a mid brown color.




The first step is to paint your foam beads a chocolate color. The good news is that the foam is really easy to paint. 
Now we have our plain chocolate cake we can have fun decorating.







 The first  two cakes have a thin layer of chocolate wrapped around them  and they also have chocolate shavings and curls.  They may look complicated but they are really easy to make.

You will need : acrylic paints, a piece of glass or a small mirror and a straight blade. 




Apply a thickish  coat of paint to  your glass. Do not make it too neat, some wrinkles will just look awesome. Leave to dry and forget about the whole thing for a few hours.






Use the straight blade to gently scrape the chocolate layer off the glass.  No need to panic if you get some small bits too , they are the perfect chocolate shavings. If you make some  long  narrow  strips  you can use them to make chocolate curls later.



Take a large  piece of chocolate , wrap around your cake and glue in place. If you do not have one piece that is big enough do not worry, no one will notice when  you patch smaller bits together. If you prefer you can even do just small bits around the whole cake. 




I like it when the chocolate wrinkles and tears a little here and there , somehow it looks more realistic that way.






You can buy very fine gravel for dolls house gardens. I often use this stuff in my cake decorating. Cover the top of the cake in glue and spread on the gravel.








The photo below shows  the same cake decorated with different materials:
Ribbon and micro beads, pink mini berries, chocolate curls and orange slices from a nail art cane.

I  made a variation on this cake and tied a ribbon round it. And I replaced the orange slices with micro beads.









The rose cake 







Ingredients:
Painted foam bead
Chocolate colored paint
Chocolate curls  
A ready made flower. I used a  cold porcelain rose that I bought.




This is the basic chocolate covered bead again but this time I did add an extra layer of chocolate icing. I used a palette knife to apply a nice layer of brown acrylic paint for that.



I had saved some long strips of the chocolate we made on the glas and I used some of those to make some nice chocolate curls for the top of this cake. Just fold and shape the long strips into nice curls and glue them on top of he cake 
The finishing touch is the rose or any other flower of your choice.






From left to right : Heartshaped cake, variation on cake one, rose cake.


The heart shaped cake.

This cake is made in the same way . I also added the chocolate curls but the rose got replaced by some gold micro beads I found with the nail art stuff at the dollar store.



The Chocolate mousse cake .





Ingredients :
Foam bead,  iced as before in the color of your choice.
Chocolate shavings like we made before.
Plastic sheet (mica)
Acrylic paint your choice of color
Hair elastics ( tiny rubber bands)
Tacky glue
Plastic flower





I wanted  chocolate to wrap around this cake that could be glued on really neat and tidy and would not break or crackle like the one we did before.
A sheet of thin plastic (myca) painted with chocolate colored paint  works really well.




When the paint has dried you can cut the plastic into strips that fit around your cake.  A nice extra is that you can use both sides of the strip.  The side that you painted will be look  more like chocolate icing while the other side will be like a smooth chocolate with a nice shine to it.




Apply tacky glue to can and wrap your chocolate round the cake.  One or two hair elastics will keep it in place till the glue has dried.




Decorate your cake with the chocolate shavings. I also added a small plastic flower that  I painted a nice chocolate color.


Cakes on my desk waiting for the photo. I did add some (talcum powder) icing sugar to some of them.




Tip :
If you have some paper punches you can punch shapes out of the chocolate covered plastic sheet for cute chocolate decorations for your cakes !